ultimately shot and killed him. [ bleep ] punks. these [ bleep ]. they always get away. those were the words in that man s chest when he got out of his car, armed with a fully loaded semiautomatic pistol and two flashlights to follow on foot trayvon benjamin martin. who was walking home from a 7-eleven. armed with 23 ounces of arizona brand fruit use and a small bag of skittles candies. on the other side, the defense is arguing that george zimmerman was forced to act in self-defense to save his own life. i want to bring in our legal analyst here, sunny hostin, who has been following this so closely. she s outside the courthouse there in sanford. sunny, we have to talk about this defense opening statement. you have don west. he tells this knock-knock joke
plenty of time. could have gone back and forth four, five times if he wanted to. but choosing not to do that, he either left and went back or just hid in the darkness to see about this guy that he thought was following him. and turned to george zimmerman out of the darkness and said why are you following me? it was the length, though, of how long it took, almost three hours for the defense to make that opening statement. and again, wolf, beginning with that joke that nobody found funny, a knock-knock joke in a murder trial just simply did not work. that s what many people walked out of the courtroom talking about today. they certainly did, martin. thanks very much. let s dig a little bit deeper with our senior legal analyst jeffrey toobin. let me play that knock-knock joke. it s already part of legal
his counterpart, his challenger had a different style. he took more than an hour. we re expecting his opening statements to take another hour. he s going from start to finish explaining every detail and he opened in a different way with a knock-knock joke. listen. knock-knock. who s there? george zimmerman. george zimmerman who? all right. good. you re on the jury. nothing. how the jury interpreted that knock-knock joke is anybody s guess. fair to say that don west is taking his time going detail by detail explaining as much as he can to show his claim that george zimmerman was confronted and then attacked by an aggressive trayvon martin and
certainly try to get his story in through other ways. he gave a confession and statement to the police. and he s appeared on television. there are lots of side doors to present the zimmerman story that the prosecutors will attempt to prevent and the defense will push. so we ll see if he testifies. but with the defense attorney opening on a knock-knock joke, i m starting to wonder about it. there is not a lot of skroof jo murder trials. to open on a joke, not a good way to get things started. everything is different on tv. i ve covered a number of trials and i feel like i was in a different trial than the one that played out on tv when i was in the courtroom. in this particular case, it felt like it fell flat. i have no idea if in the courtroom it did or did not. because there are six women sitting on that panel. danny, when it comes to that, what exactly was the point that the defense attorney was trying to make by saying knock-knock,
the whole thing started with a knock-knock joke. knock, knock. who s there? george zimmerman. george zimmerman who? all right. good. you re on the jury. yep. that really happened. you will have to hear how the jury reacted to that. we re live outside the courtroom in florida, next. [ female announcer ] your smile. like other precious things that start off white, it yellows over time.